She's her own man / 'Self-Made Man' / Journalist passed as a man to get an inside perspective on masculinity

Reyhan Harmanci

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, January 25, 2007

Photo: C/o Viking

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Norah Vincent, author of "Self-Made Man."
Credit: C/o Viking

Norah Vincent, author of "Self-Made Man."
Credit: C/o Viking

Photo: C/o Viking

She's her own man / 'Self-Made Man' / Journalist passed as a man to get an inside perspective on masculinity

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When journalist Norah Vincent first put on drag, with a drag king friend, for a lark, she had no idea that it would lead to taking a year off, in 2003, to become "Ned" and investigate what the world looks like through male eyes.

The resulting book, "Self-Made Man," shows that many surprises await on the other side of the gender divide. Using six months of weight training, lessons from a voice coach, help from a makeup artist friend, a sports bra two sizes too small and a new wardrobe of button-downs and baggy pants, Vincent transformed herself into Ned. She got a job in sales, joined a bowling league and went on dates with both men and women. She even spent time in a monastery, and then a men's retreat, to further delve into a man's world.

The most unexpected epiphanies came from how much warmth she found among men, especially her bowling buddies. "I thought that most men would treat someone like me, a reedy guy, with disdain," Vincent says. "I was afraid that they would be homophobic or intolerant.

"Of course none of those things turned out to be true. When I came out to them, they were amazingly receptive. They just made the leap very easily -- I mean, we had become friends. The quality of the relationship changed when I revealed that I was a woman, but the friendship remained."

Vincent says that she kept her transition to Ned superficial, and part of the reason her book succeeds is that she never really identified as a man. Her detachment kept her eyes open to the differences in how people perceived her as a man as opposed to a woman. "I was always afraid of being found out. I was never fully inhabiting the character," she says. She notes, however, that "the way that I look in my general life ... made the transition easier."

One tricky aspect of her experience was dating. The interactions Vincent had as Ned tended to be superficial to avoid hurting anyone. Vincent writes about one woman, Sasha, with whom she went on several dates and whom she ended up taking to bed. Others didn't react so well. "People I dated once or twice -- I didn't get to know them well enough to write about them," she says. "But they were very annoyed at the time. Probably rightly so."

Vincent remains sympathetic to the male condition. "At the beginning, I had the feeling that being a man meant you got to have all this privilege, have this big experience," she says. "It wasn't like that at all. It was like joining another subset. There were privileges, sure, but there were flip sides that I had never thought of."

Emotional expression ranked high on the limitations of masculinity. While women get punished for showing anger, they also get to show tenderness and weakness not allowed for many men. "It was very hard for me to go from being a woman with this whole range of expressions and then have to clamp them down.